Finding excuses to hate

The person I was conversing with in my last post went on to claim that she doesn’t hate Teh Gays, her church is just trying to save them from a self-destructive lifestyle. She then listed rates of STI’s among gay men. This is for her.

/sigh. So much to unpack.

First, almost every issue you have listed for gay men is due to them being MEN, not due to them being GAY. If women had the same sexual proclivities that men do, the straight community would have the same problems. For example, body image problems and eating disorders are quite common among straight women – because they are trying to attract men. For another example, lesbian women have the lowest STD/STI rates of all populations. In fact, “According to the CDC, there are no confirmed cases of HIV from female-to-female transmission.”

The conclusion is clear – if you are concerned about STIs you should be demonizing anyone who has sex with a man, rather than the gays. You should forbid marriage with men, and only allow it between women.

Furthermore, you should be preaching from the pulpit that anyone who advocates for abstinence-only education is as bad as thieves and adulterers. Because as it turns out, communities that enact abstinence-only education have the highest STI and teen-pregnancy rates in the country. “Specifically, in communities where more than 20% of young adults had taken virginity pledges, STD rates were 8.9% compared to 5.5% in communities with few pledgers”

I could go on, but my point is this – it’s not really about the STI rates. Any sub-group will have a number of variances from the general average, some which are better and some which are worse. Racists often latch on to the fact that minority communities have higher crime rates to demonize whichever minority they despise. The anti-gay-crowd managed to find a statistic about a group they dislike that is worse than the general population, and so they latched onto that. We can tell they don’t actually care about that issue because they aren’t against it in the general case.

As a question: if gay men had the same STI rates as gay women – that is, significantly lower than the straight population – would you be pro-gays? Or would you find something else to attack?

There are things that are statistically better about the gay community as well. On the average they are better educated than us straights, have a higher income, and families headed by a gay couple have a near-zero rate of child abuse. All of these are arguably more impactful to society than a person’s STI status.

And finally, if we are to believe the claim that they are just concerned about someone’s self-destructive behavior, we are compelled to ask – do the fundamentalists TRULY believe that the best way to end this self-destructive behavior is to refuse them the right to marry, to preach about how god is disgusted by them, and to bully and harass them at every opportunity? Because if so, the fundies are in desperate need of an education in human psychology.